Witty, intelligent, and most convincing when it’s altogether over the top.

| May 2, 2024

Despite some interesting set pieces... Almereyda could have infused the proceedings with more energy and less brooding.

| May 25, 2022

The films pops off the screen in brilliant color and striking arrangements of actors.

| Sep 16, 2020

Almereyda's details actually give the core story an additional layer of power. The cyclical decay of Hamlet still resonates, even as its '90s flourishes have become increasingly irrelevant.

| Jun 5, 2020

Ingeniously and divertingly updating Shakespeare to corporate New York, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet benefits from playfully iconographic casting.

| Apr 10, 2018

This melancholy Dane is son of the deceased Chairman of Denmark Corporation. His castle is a sleek but alienating New York high rise dotted with omnipresent surveillance cameras, his kingdom city streets lined with paparazzi and tabloid reporters.

| Feb 4, 2018

Too often, the gimmick of modern-dress Shakespeare is undone by the sheer visual incongruity of people in business suits speaking in 17th-century vernacular. Hawke (and those surrounding him) somehow make it play.

| Jun 21, 2016

2000 version of Hamlet is just dreadful.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 24, 2010

I like the way the material has truly been "adapted" to its modern setting without the language being adulterated.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2009

| Original Score: 65/100 | Oct 18, 2008

It could prove almost as definitive -- and far more easily digestible -- than Branagh's textually complete version.

| Jul 6, 2008

Almereyda pares the drama down to its bloody core, leaving a potent tale of despair, madness and loss.

| Jul 6, 2008

The movie is almost playful in its mission to burrow around inside "Hamlet" and discover what's still relevant about it.

| Original Score: B | Sep 17, 2007

The lines are read for the most part with more feeling for the angry-stepchild plot than for the iambic pentameter.

| Apr 27, 2007

Almereyda modernises and streamlines without trivializing, and amplifies poetic melodrama with regular ingenuity and energy.

| Jun 3, 2006

The city becomes a living emblem of the tense coexistence of art and corporatism, an uneasy relationship which Almereyda emphasizes as the core conflict of his picture.

| Original Score: B | Jun 3, 2006

[This is] an imaginative and exciting update, lacking only the decent swordfight the ending demands.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 3, 2006

I guess Johnny Depp was busy, so they got the one that can't act.

| Original Score: 0.5/5 | Jun 3, 2006

No, Ethan Hawke can't do Shakespeare.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 3, 2006

In a sense, it's B-movie Shakespeare, the same as Orson Welles' inspired version of Macbeth (1948), which was produced on a skimpy budget for a B-picture studio.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 26, 2004